by Mark Alpert
Cyrus’s calm, reasonable voice droned on. He sounded as if he were reciting a shopping list instead of the preparations for Doomsday. David kept his eyes closed, too appalled to even look at the man. Jesus, he thought, how the hell did Cyrus acquire all this classified information? How did he know so much about the air force’s warheads and targets? It couldn’t have all come from General McNair. David couldn’t begin to fathom it. In frustration, he gave up thinking and started banging the back of his head against the bench. It was the only response that made any sense.
He soon felt Cyrus’s gloved hand on his forehead, holding him still. David opened his eyes and saw the man kneeling on the floor. “I understand, David. I’ve felt this pain, too. I was also a prisoner once, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I’d come to Afghanistan to field-test a new reconnaissance drone. An infantry platoon was escorting me to an airfield near Jalalabad when the Taliban ambushed us.” He lowered his head and stared at the ground. “Satan’s foot soldiers captured me and took me to a cave in Gazarak Mountain. Then the interrogations began. Satan’s men took turns, torturing and mutilating me. And then, three days later, I was rescued. My old friend Sam McNair led a Special Forces team that raided the hideout and killed my captors. But the Lord had already saved me, David. I saw His blessed face for the first time on that mountain. And now the same thing can happen to you. All you need to do is turn to Him.”
David pushed his forehead against the gloved hand, trying to shake it off, but Cyrus pressed down firmly. Then, with his other hand, he began to take off his head scarf. He gripped the end of the black fabric and carefully unwound it, moving his hand in slow circles around his head. “I’m going to show you something now. I was once a sinful man, proud and arrogant in my corruption. And I still live in that man’s body and speak profanities with his tongue. And I still wear his hideous face. I’ve endured it like a deadweight for the past seven years while I hid my true self and my knowledge of the Lord. But in just a few hours I will cast it off. I will give up this mutilated flesh and deliver my soul to heaven, where my thoughts will rest eternally with God.” His hand went around his head one more time, pulling the last band of fabric from his face. The scarf fell to the ground. “Pray with me now, David. Let us show our true selves to the Lord.”
David stared at him. Cyrus had a square, pinkish face. His lips were slender, his eyes were gray, and his forehead was topped with thinning white hair. His face wasn’t hideous or mutilated. It was unscarred and perfectly ordinary, the face of a mild-mannered sixty-something-year-old man.
He smiled. “You’ve seen me before, haven’t you?”
It was true. David had seen him before.
JOE DOWLING OF THE DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY CALLED BACK after fifty-eight minutes. “Aryeh? I got the information you wanted. I’ll put it in a packet and leave it for you at the usual place.”
Aryeh squeezed his phone. He couldn’t wait for the information. He needed to know this instant. “No, tell me now. Tell me the name.”
“Over the phone? Are you sure—”
“Yes, over the phone! Do you want to get paid or not?”
There was a pause. “Okay, here goes. The network access code used by the contact in Turkmenistan belongs to a director at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency. The name is Adam Cyrus Bennett.”
33
MICHAEL WAS CRYING, BUT THERE WERE STILL NO TEARS. MONIQUE HANDED him a canteen and told him to take a small sip of water. Then she helped him stand up and led him to one of the helicopters. Halfway there, his knees buckled and he started to fall, but the big soldier with the eye patch grasped his arm. He was one of the biggest men Michael had ever seen. He had a terrible smell, like an old sneaker.
“Shalom!” he boomed. “My name is Olam.” His voice was loud, but Michael didn’t mind so much. It was better than listening to the pounding of his own pulse.
When they reached the helicopter, another soldier helped Michael climb aboard. Two more soldiers gripped his elbows and guided him to a bench seat on the left side of the cabin. They were odd-looking soldiers—they had long, scruffy beards and wore black uniforms and knitted skullcaps. But Michael didn’t care. He’d never been inside a helicopter before and he was eager to look around. The cabin was about seven feet wide and fifteen feet long, with bench seats on both sides. He craned his neck to see the cockpit, but Monique stopped him from getting up to take a closer look. She sat beside him on the bench seat and made him take another sip of water from the canteen, a bigger sip this time. Then she hugged him.
“Oh, Michael! Thank God! Thank God!”
He would’ve screamed if anyone else had hugged him. But for some reason Monique’s touch felt different—not as alien or jarring. It had been the same way with his mother. Michael didn’t really like the hug, but he could tolerate it.
“How long were you in the desert?” she asked. “And how did you get here? What were you doing with that motorcycle?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk about Tamara or how he got the Ural. He took another sip from the canteen instead.
She pulled back and looked at his face. Then she nodded. “It’s all right, Michael. I’m just glad we found you.”
“Yes, it’s a miracle,” said Olam. The one-eyed soldier stood beside the bench seat, bending over so his head wouldn’t hit the cabin’s ceiling. “Like a story from the Bible, yes? The well in the middle of the desert? The God of Abraham has given us a hard time, but He hasn’t abandoned us.”
A thought occurred to Michael. He looked around the cabin again, counting all the people inside. “Where’s David Swift?” he asked. “Is he in the other helicopter?”
Monique lowered her head. Her cheeks were wet. She wasn’t dehydrated, so there were tears when she cried.
Olam patted her arm. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “He’s alive.” Then he turned to Michael. “David was with us until eight hours ago, when we were ambushed in Yangykala Canyon. I saw the bastards capture him and kill Agent Parker, but they didn’t kill David. They put him in one of their Land Cruisers and headed southeast.”
Michael dared to glance at the man’s lone eye. It looked very big for an eye, as big as a golf ball. Its iris was bright blue. “Is this your helicopter?”
“It is now!” Olam laughed, and the sound echoed in the cabin. “After we escaped from Yangykala, we regrouped with the six men I’d sent on reconnaissance. Then the Turkmen Army sent their MI-8s after us.”
Michael knew what an MI-8 was. He’d seen them in his computer games. The helicopter he was sitting in, he realized, was an MI-8. He would’ve recognized it earlier if he hadn’t been so woozy. “The MI-8 is a Russian-made troop-transport helicopter,” he told Olam. “It can also be used as a gunship.”
“Yes, the Turkmen Army inherited some of them after the Soviet Union broke up. I have to tell you, they’re not very good. I like to fly the Yanshuf, the Israeli version of the Black Hawk. Compared to the Yanshuf, this is a piece of garbage.” He banged his fist on the wall of the cabin. “And these particular MI-8s have no rockets or missiles on their racks. The only armaments are the built-in machine guns.”
Michael smiled. He liked talking to this soldier. “But if these helicopters belong to the Turkmen Army, how did you—”
“Ah, yes, we played a little trick on them. When the helicopters approached, we put down our guns and surrendered. But once they landed, we changed our minds about surrendering.” He let out another booming laugh. Then he reached into the pocket of his fatigues and removed a piece of paper. “We found these orders on the helicopter pilots. Someone had told them where we were. And the same orders instructed the pilots to search for you, too.” He pointed at Michael. “This paper said you were headed south from an oasis village in Dashoguz province. That’s how we found you.”
Monique raised her head. She’d wiped the tears from her cheeks. “The Turkmen Army is cooperating with the soldiers who attacked us. Whoever’s in charge of the operatio
n must’ve—”
“His name is Brother Cyrus,” Michael said. “I was in his camp near Darvaza.”
Monique stared at him. “Brother Cyrus? Is that his real name?”
“That’s what his soldiers call him. He wears a head scarf over his face.”
Very gently, Monique grasped his shoulder. “This is important. Michael. How many soldiers does he have?”
Michael closed his eyes and searched his memory. “I counted a total of fifty-two soldiers in the camp. Twenty-five of them wore Special Operations insignia. I also saw seven Land Cruisers, six Tundra pickups, and four Kamaz trucks.”
“What else? Did this Brother Cyrus have something called Excalibur? Did he ever mention that name, Michael?”
He turned away from her. He remembered the name. “He said he was going to unsheathe Excalibur. He said the code would tell them how to aim God’s sword at the weakest part of this broken world.”
“What did he mean by ‘the code’? Did he mean a program?”
Michael nodded. His eyes stung, and now he felt hot tears on his cheeks. “I broke my promise. I told him the code.”
“And this program embodies the laws of physics?” Her voice was softer now, no more than a whisper. “And shows how to remake the universe?”
His tears blurred his vision. Monique’s face shifted and dissolved. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It’s my fault! I’m sorry!”
Monique pulled him close and hugged him again. Crying hard, he rested his forehead in the crook of her neck. Until it actually happened, he didn’t think Monique would forgive him. How could you forgive someone for killing the world? But she wouldn’t be holding him right now, he thought, if she’d hadn’t forgiven him.
He sat there for almost a minute while Monique patted and rubbed his back, making circular “there, there” motions. Finally she said, “It’s all right, Michael. We’re going to sort this out.” Then she turned to Olam. “Should we contact the Americans in Afghanistan?” she asked. “This helicopter has a radio, doesn’t it?”
“And what will we tell them?” Olam’s brow wrinkled below his skullcap. “That a man named Brother Cyrus is planning to crash the universe? Even if they believed us, they couldn’t act fast enough. First they’d start their own investigation. Then they’d send diplomatic cables to the Turkmen president. Then they’d wait for him to reply.” He shook his head. “No, it’s too late for that. Cyrus is ready to strike.”
“Well, what can we do about it? We don’t know where he is!”
Olam pulled another sheet of paper from his pocket. “We know that the convoy of Land Cruisers headed southeast from Yangykala Canyon.” He unfolded the paper and tapped the top left corner. “We could fly back there and try to retrace the convoy’s route.”
Monique leaned forward to look at the paper, and so did Michael. It was a map of Turkmenistan. The country was shaped like a shoe, with the heel and sole pressing down on Iran and the toe digging into Afghanistan. And in the part of the sole where it arched most sharply, Michael saw a familiar name. He pointed at it. “Kuruzhdey,” he said.
“What?” Monique looked at him. “Did you say something, Michael?”
“Kuruzhdey,” he repeated. “That’s where Angel said Brother Cyrus’s trucks were going.”
Olam brought the map closer to his face. Then he spun around and said something in Hebrew to his men. Two of the soldiers dashed out of the helicopter and raced across the dunes to the other MI-8. Another two men rushed forward to the cockpit and began flipping switches on the control panels. In a few seconds Michael heard the whine of the helicopter’s turboshaft engines.
Olam looked over his shoulder as he stepped into the cockpit. “It’s two hundred fifty kilometers away,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
34
BROTHER CYRUS DEPARTED FROM CAMP COBRA BY WAY OF THE BACKDOOR tunnel that bypassed the main entrance. Nicodemus and most of the other True Believers went with him, shining their flashlights on the tunnel’s rocky walls. Cyrus had left a dozen men behind to guard the tent that held Little Boy. These holy martyrs would remain in the cavern’s lower chamber to make sure that no one interfered with the nuclear device. It was probably an unnecessary precaution; none of the Rangers in the camp knew about the bomb, and General McNair had already ordered his men to stay away from the tent. But the Lord, Cyrus knew, always rewarded the prudent. McNair would also stay behind in Camp Cobra while Cyrus and his followers crossed into Iran. Little Boy’s detonator was set to go off at two o’clock, which gave them nearly an hour to get clear.
Cyrus’s knees ached as he climbed the dark, narrow path. It would’ve been more comfortable to leave the cavern by the main entrance, passing the long rows of tents in the upper chamber and the dozens of aircraft parked just inside the cave’s mouth. But he couldn’t walk through Camp Cobra wearing his head scarf, and if he went unmasked one of the Rangers might recognize him. Although Adam Cyrus Bennett was a civilian, he was well known in the U.S. Army. He’d started his career in 1969 as a researcher at the Livermore lab, where he’d learned about nuclear warheads and X-ray lasers. When the cold war ended he became a director at DARPA, in charge of awarding Defense Department grants to researchers developing new military technologies. For the next twelve years he was a dedicated civil servant, frequently visiting the front lines to field-test new weapons and determine what the soldiers needed. It was during one of those visits, a trip to eastern Afghanistan in 2004, that the Taliban ambushed his army escorts and took him to the cave in Gazarak Mountain. Then Adam Cyrus Bennett saw the Lord’s face and realized that he’d been serving the wrong master.
After McNair’s troops rescued him, he was flown back to Washington and spent the next three months recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The doctors said he made a remarkable recovery, especially considering the severity of his wounds. After another month of rest, he returned to his office at DARPA and his job of sustaining America’s military superiority. By that point, however, he wasn’t Adam Cyrus Bennett anymore. Satan’s foot soldiers had torn his spirit from his body, yanking his corrupted soul through the carvings they’d made in his chest and back and crotch. But the Lord, in His infinite wisdom, had filled his body with a new spirit. He was Brother Cyrus now, God’s humble servant. “Adam Cyrus Bennett” was nothing more than a disguise, a way to secretly fulfill the Lord’s plans.
And it was a good disguise, ideally suited for his new mission. Every year Cyrus’s office distributed $500 million of research grants. About a third of the funding came from the Pentagon’s classified “black budget.” Because the Defense Department didn’t have to disclose the details of these appropriations, it was easy for Cyrus to secretly funnel a sizable amount to the Redemption. He’d used the classified funds to hire experts to study the intelligence reports about the unified field theory. The black budget had also financed the clandestine activities of the True Believers—the fleet of trucks and Land Cruisers, the camp in the Turkmen desert—as well as the theft of the enriched uranium from the reactor in Kazakhstan. Cyrus had used another chunk of money to establish Logos Enterprises, the shell company that whisked Excalibur out of the Livermore lab. And he’d spent $10 million on the construction of Jacob Steele’s Caduceus Array.
This was the trickiest part of the operation. Jacob had come to DARPA with the proposal of building single-ion clocks to prove the computational nature of spacetime. Cyrus saw right away that such an instrument would be useful to his cause. By measuring the fleeting time disruptions caused by the Excalibur test in Iran, the Caduceus Array would show whether the laser could really trigger the Redemption. Keeping his true purpose a secret, Cyrus allowed Jacob to divert his DARPA grant to the experiment. After the Iranian nuclear test, Cyrus’s men went to Jacob’s lab and downloaded the data on the disruptions, then blew up the place to destroy the evidence. But the reclusive physicist had a secret of his own—from the very beginning Jacob had refused to reveal the name of his Israeli collaborator. Cy
rus ultimately sent one of the True Believers to pry the information from him, but Jacob said nothing even when Lukas held a nine-millimeter pistol to his head. Fortunately, Cyrus had a few clues to the Israeli’s identity, which he passed on to Special Agent Lucille Parker when she came to investigate the lab explosion. He knew she could locate the mysterious Olam ben Z’man. And when she did find him, Cyrus arranged the ambush in Yangykala Canyon to eliminate the threat.
As he looked back on it now, Cyrus couldn’t help but marvel at his success. He felt no personal pride, however; all the credit belonged to the Lord, who’d blessed him with so many ardent followers. General McNair was the first, and Cyrus soon found others who hated the corrupt world and yearned for God’s kingdom. He and McNair focused their efforts on their colleagues in the Defense Department, recruiting two more general officers and several dozen lower-ranking soldiers. These True Believers were all too familiar with the world’s corruption, having seen it firsthand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their souls had been lacerated by war and its atrocities. Before meeting Cyrus, many of the soldiers had contemplated suicide. But once they realized that Cyrus could extinguish the evil and open the gates to heaven—a real heaven, not some childish fantasy—they pledged themselves to the Lord. At the same time, Cyrus assembled his network of paid informants, using the DARPA funds to infiltrate government agencies in the United States and Israel. In addition to providing valuable intelligence, these informants helped Cyrus shield his operation from the scrutiny of federal bureaucrats and inspectors.
